05 Consider Your Calling: Why God Chooses the Weak (1 Corinthians 1:26-31)

Krisan Marotta: Thank you for joining me today for the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krissan Morata, and this is Serious Bible Study Applied to Real Life. It's the podcast where we explain not only what scripture means, but how we know. This is the fifth talk in our series on 1 Corinthians. Today we're gonna study 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 26 through 31. And if you're driving or jogging or listening while you're on the treadmill, you don't need to take notes or try to remember everything. I have lecture notes on my website, which you can find on the link below the podcast, or you can go to Wednesdayandtheword.com slash 1 Corinthians 5. Thank you for downloading the podcast. Let's get started. Just to start with review, as always, the Apostle Paul wrote this letter to the church at Corinth. This is a church that he founded and stayed with for about a year and a half. The church was a mixed church, primarily a Gentile church composed of Greeks and Romans and freed slaves and some Jews. Corinth was an exceptionally wealthy and important city in Greece at the time. You could think of it as kind of like the Las Vegas of the Roman Empire. It was highly decadent and sophisticated, and it was also an important military outpost and strategic for sea travel. Paul has received a letter from the Corinthians asking him a series of questions as well as a verbal report about the situation in Corinth, and he is responding to those reports with this letter. The first issue he tackles is the factions or divisions in the church. But Paul's concern is not just to help them get along better, he is addressing the root cause of the divisions, and that cause is their foolish worldly wisdom. And this argument began in one ten and it's going to go all the way through the end of chapter four. Some in the Corinthian church have rejected Paul's authority and aligned themselves with Apollos, and others have aligned themselves with Paul. And Paul's first point in this situation was that he and Apollos both preach the same gospel. They both preach Jesus Christ crucified. So there's no reason to choose between them because they're teaching the same gospel, they're on the same side. And he points out everyone is a follower of Christ, no one is a follower of Paul, no one is a follower of Apollos, and he encourages the Corinthians to unite around the truth of the gospel rather than a teacher. And then Paul turns to his major concern in this section of the letter, and that is their perspective on wisdom. Many in the Corinthian church have rejected Paul because they don't think he has the right kind of wisdom. He doesn't speak with power and flair and sophistry. To the Corinthians, Paul is embarrassing. They want someone with more style and eloquence and someone who is less offensive and teaches a less offensive message. And Paul says they are really foolish to value the style of the message over the content of the message. The gospel is the truth about how to obtain eternal life, and they are foolish to throw that away because they find the speaker boring or lacking a specific kind of debate skills. As for changing his message to make it less offensive, Paul says that's not going to happen. Making the gospel message attractive to the world means it's no longer the gospel. Preaching the gospel itself means you're going to look foolish in the eyes of the world. And he argues God is very content with that. God created things and set everything up such that his message looks foolish to the elite intellectual people of the world. And Paul says he would rather preach the gospel accurately and completely and look foolish in the eyes of the world than preach a distorted gospel. And that's where we pick up his argument in one twenty six. I'm going to read one twenty six to thirty one, this is the New American Standard Version. For consider your calling, brethren, there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen things that are not, so that he may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God, but by his doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. So that just as it is written, let him who boasts boast in the Lord. In this section, Paul says, Okay, let's think about how God changed you Corinthians. As we're discussing this issue of whether or not to change the gospel message to make it more attractive to the powerful, sophisticated people of the world, let's look at your conversion. Consider what happened to you when I first preached the gospel in Corinth. Let's consider your calling. Look at one twenty six again. For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble. Essentially, he's saying what makes you think the gospel would be attractive to the powerful, sophisticated people in Corinth? You aren't the powerful sophisticated people. What happened in Corinth when I first preached the gospel there? Who embraced and believed the message? Well in your hometown, not many folks from that social class that you so admire embrace the gospel. Look at who responded in Corinth, you guys, and you were not the intellectual elite. Now you can't accuse Paul of buttering them up here. He's being honest, but it's potentially insulting. He's saying look at your own church. Not many of you are part of the wise and powerful people as you measure wise and powerful people. So why would he bring this up? Think about human nature. We all find it easier to accept something that the acceptable people accept. It's just easier to fit in when you agree with the movers and the shakers. And all of us feel that temptation. It's easier to go with the flow and be in the majority and jump on the bandwagon. There's a security in being part of the vocal majority. If everyone thinks something and everyone thinks it's true, then it must be right. And if you don't believe me, just post something politically incorrect to social media and watch your life get destroyed. It is hard to be on the side that is on the outs, the side that doesn't fit with the views of the people who are seen as in the know. And it's hard to be on the team that the powerful, sophisticated people of the world look down on. Paul is speaking to that temptation and he's reminding them, look at how God did things in your own church. Having status, having smarts, having worldly savvy didn't do any good when it came to the gospel. When I Paul came to town and preached the gospel, who responded? Was it the intellectual giants, the philosophers, the worldly elite? No, those kind of people were not the ones who responded. The people who responded were the people who were considered to be losers in the world's eyes, the foolish people, like you. To respond to the gospel, you have to embrace some really unpopular ideas, and they are ideas that most people just don't want to embrace. Things like there is something desperately wrong with me. I am a sinner in rebellion to God, and I am not the stellar statue of moral virtue and perfection that I like to think I am. I have to recognize that I can't change this problem of sin with my own resources and that all my trying harder and all my best efforts are just not gonna work. I have to recognize that God owes me nothing, there's no divine spark within me that gives me worth or value such that God is obligated to save me. I am lost and hopeless and morally bankrupt, and I am completely at the mercy of God. If He doesn't reach out and save me out of His own goodness and mercy, then I will not be saved, and not being saved would be fair and just because I don't deserve salvation. Those ideas are not typically the ideas that the powerful and elite among us want to embrace. In terms of human accomplishment, and I think that's what he means by the flesh in verse twenty six, he says not many of you were particularly noteworthy, and notice the M, he doesn't say not any of you, he says not many of you. Paul is not arguing that if you are accomplished in the world or you're at the top of your field, you will never be saved. That is not his point. He's not saying that those of noble birth or those with professional achievement or the intellectual giants are excluded from the gospel. What he's saying is their noble birth, their professional achievement, their intellectual ability, that doesn't give them an advantage. Knowing all there is to know about medicine or field of science or inventing the next generation of microchips or even curing cancer, all that's well and good, but it's not gonna help you when it comes to the gospel. Human accomplishment, no matter how worthy and grand it is, has no value when it comes to salvation. What characterizes those who come to faith and believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ is not human accomplishment, but humility before God. What counts is understanding your own sin and your own need for a savior and the grace of God. Conquering worldly knowledge doesn't give anyone any advantage. It was our firm grasp of reality as God sees it and humbling ourselves before Him that counts. Coming to recognize I'm a sinner in need of a savior is more important than being at the top of my field. And Paul's argument here is we can learn something about how God works in the world by looking at what happened when I preached the gospel in Corinth. What was it that God did there? Let's keep going. Look at one twenty seven to twenty nine. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen things that are not so that he might nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. That sounds confusing when you read it, but essentially what he's saying is for all our worldly wisdom have we arrived at a knowledge of God? Did we solve the human dilemma? Did we fix the problems of humanity? No. Who did find God? Who did find a solution for sin? Who did arrive at eternal life? Well, the people the world considers the riffraff. God chose to ignore the world's idea of class. When it comes to salvation and who he chose, God ignored the world's idea of social standing, he ignored intellectual accomplishment and professional glory, and he ignored our ideas of power and authority when making his choice. Paul says, Look, you Corinthians didn't arrive at faith because you had any of those things, because most of you didn't have any of those things. And the few of you who did have those things got to faith in spite of them. They didn't give you an advantage. The group that the world would so easily overlook and reject is going to turn out to be the ones who are right and wise in the end. The group with the ideas that the world considers foolish will in the end stand before God vindicated and be shown to be the ones who were actually wise. And why did God do it this way? one twenty nine, so that no man may boast before God. Boasting is an important concept in the New Testament. Paul talks about it in several of his letters, most notably Romans five. But his idea of boasting is not what we modern Americans think of when we talk about boasting. We tend to think I'm better than you or that I'm lying or exaggerating in order to put myself above someone else or elevate myself some way. But that's not what Paul means by boasting. For him, the contrast is between these things about which I am ashamed and these things about which I boast. There's all this stuff that I wish you wouldn't see. This stuff about me, my sin, my flaws, my selfishness, and all that stuff that I try to hide and excuse and deny. It makes me look bad. I'm ashamed of it. On the other hand, there's all this stuff that I'm not ashamed about that I would like to put forward and I would like you to remember when you think of me. And these are the things I boast in. I can display them openly and be proud of them. So it's a good thing to want to be an honorable, godly person. We would all like to be that kind of person. And I would like to boast about being an honorable person and have you see me that way and put that forward about myself. And I'm ashamed about the times when I am dishonorable and hope that you'll just overlook and forget those. Now we associate boasting with lying because we tend to exaggerate the good things about ourselves beyond what they really are, and we tend to use them as a lever to pull ourselves up and put someone else down. So we boast typically about something to say I'm better than someone else, and we have to exaggerate and stretch the truth to get there. But that's not what Paul's talking about here. For us, in reality, all our boasting is a lie. I mean, what do we have that God has not given us? What do we have that we earned apart from the grace of God? Nothing. In all our boasting, we tend to ignore God's place in the picture and we make something of ourselves that we're not. Because everything we think of as our own accomplishment is in reality a gift of God. This way God has of saving his people highlights the fact that no one can boast. First, it demonstrates that the natural gifts of intelligence, success, social status, worldly power, that they mean nothing when it comes to salvation. All those things that I have that I think give me a place in the world, that give me a leg up, they are not enough to bring me to God. As Paul's been saying, God did not choose anyone because that person had these kinds of things. God doesn't measure human accomplishment to see if we're worthy of salvation. Our accomplishments do not win us God's favor. And second, whatever gifts God has given me in terms of worldly wisdom or human accomplishment or status or intellectual success, they have not made me a wise person when it comes to the most important questions of life. I am still foolish if I ignore the truth of the gospel, no matter how much worldly wisdom or how many gifts I might boast about. Those who do come to God don't come to him because of their human wisdom and accomplishment. Reaching great heights of human achievement doesn't give me the kind of wisdom I need to find God. Therefore, I have no reason to boast about myself. My accomplishments did not influence God to make him choose me, and my accomplishments did not help me find God. I have nothing to boast about except what God has done for me in Christ. Look at thirty and thirty-one again. But by his doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that just as it is written, let him who boasts boast in the Lord. It is by God's doing that we are in Christ Jesus. By nature, even the best of us, as we measure best, do not come to God. By nature, even the most gifted among us do not come to know God. There's nothing we can do left to ourselves to figure this out on our own, to earn our salvation or to work our way back into God's good graces. We are not saved by our own doing or by doing anything. It is by God's doing that we are saved. In His mercy God saves some of us. He opened our eyes to see the truth, He gave us the ears to hear and understand the gospel and the humility to repent such that we now have godly wisdom and redemption. By an act of God we see and recognize that the message about Christ crucified is true wisdom. Our only reason to boast is to boast in what God has done for us and not be ashamed of the gospel. That's his point at the end of this section. But let's talk about those terms at the end of verse thirty. By his doing you are in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God. We've talked a lot about what he means by wisdom, and now he says, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. The interpretive problem in this verse is that all of these words are used to talk about two different things. They can all refer to our situation now in the present, and they can all refer to our ultimate situation in eternity. In some contexts, authors use them to describe our situation now, and in other contexts, authors use these exact same words to talk about our situation in eternity. So righteousness means right standing before God. When talking about our situation now, righteousness tends to point to the fact that we are justified, that our debt to God's justice has been paid, and we are no longer under God's wrath. So we are no longer considered guilty before God, we are justified, and thus we are in right standing before Him. When talking about our eternal situation, righteousness tends to point to holiness, that is that time when we are finally freed from the power and presence and penalty of sin and we are holy as God is holy. So we have right standing before God because we are no longer sinners. And we see both of those uses in Paul's letters. Similarly, sanctification means being set apart for God's use. When talking about the here and now, sanctification can often refers to being accepted by God now as belonging to God and counted as one of his children. So God chose us to be part of his people and set us apart for his purposes, and in that sense we're sanctified now. It can also refer to this process of being made more like God as we grow in wisdom and maturity, and our characters become more like him. So having come to faith and belief, we start this journey of faith toward maturity and wisdom, and that journey will complete in eternity when we are fully made holy and sanctified. So sanctification can refer to the here and now, the fact that I am set apart to belong to God, or it can refer to that future day when I will be fully like Him. Redemption means being forgiven or bought out of slavery to sin. And again, sometimes redemption talks about our being forgiven now. We are no longer under God's wrath because of the cross. Because of the cross we are forgiven, our debt to justice has been paid, and we are redeemed now in that sense. But there is another redemption coming when God will finally free us completely from the power, presence, and penalty of sin and establish his kingdom. And redemption can also talk about that kind of redemption that awaits us when our hope is fully realized and we are fully redeemed from sin and death. So the question is which of those does Paul mean here? Is he talking about the now aspect or the eternal aspect? And this is one of those passages where I'm not sure it really matters a great deal. Which way you decide. If you think he's pointing to the here and now aspect, that works and makes a lot of sense in the passage. If you think he's pointing to the eternal aspect, that also works and makes sense in the passage. I'm inclined to lean toward the here and now because he has been talking so much in this context about how we come to faith and respond to the gospel, but I think you could make a good argument either way, and in the end I think you end up in the same interpretive place. The main point he's making is that to the world the gospel of Jesus Christ is foolish, but those whom God has chosen see the message of Jesus Christ for the wisdom that it is. And why is it wisdom? Because we understand that Christ is the means by which we are made right with God and delivered from the punishment for our sin. We understand that we do not have the power to escape God's wrath on our own and have chosen to find our life and deliverance in Christ. By God's gracious choice we have come to see our desperate situation and recognize the way of salvation, and we may be fools in many ways as the world measures foolishness, but if we have embraced the gospel we have wisely understood the most important truth of all. Paul concludes in one hundred thirty one with a quote from Jeremiah nine twenty three, and this is Jeremiah nine twenty three and twenty four. Thus says the Lord, let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boasts of this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who exercises loving kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth, for I delight in these things, declares the Lord. And notice the three types of people in Jeremiah nine twenty three are very close to the three types of people Paul mentioned earlier in one hundred twenty six. I suspect Paul had this Jeremiah quote in mind all along. This verse in Jeremiah is part of an indictment against the nation of Israel for its rejection of God. The wise, the powerful, and the nobility were ignoring God. They paid lip service to him, but by and large they ignored him. They violated his will, they violated his laws, they ignored his principles. And Jeremiah is telling them, look, a great judgment is coming, and in that context he says our verse. Essentially, I think his point is don't boast in that stuff because it will fail you in this great coming judgment. You think you have everything the way the world measures success. You've got wealth, you've got power, you've got riches, but all that stuff is not gonna save you. Don't boast in that stuff. If you want to boast, you should boast in the fact that you know God and that you follow Him. Being wise and rich and powerful is nothing to boast about in Jeremiah's day, and it's nothing to boast about in Paul's day, and it's nothing to boast about now. It didn't help then, it doesn't help now. The believer is the only one who can boast, and our boast is in knowing God. Specifically, we can boast that we know and understand what God is doing through the cross of Jesus Christ. So what are we boasting in? Not our own status, not our smarts, not our power, not our achievements, not our beauty, our riches, our physical athletic ability. That stuff gets us nowhere when it comes to salvation. We're boasting in the fact that Christ saved us by his blood, by dying in our place on the cross. Who is it that bought this redemption for us? Christ did. We didn't contribute anything. Whose choice was it? It was God's choice. He opened my eyes and gave me the eyes to see. So I can't boast in my natural gifts, I can't boast in salvation that I did something to make it happen. I have no reason to say I'm better than anyone else because I didn't contribute anything to my salvation. But I can boast and rejoice in the gospel. I ought not to be ashamed of the message of Christ crucified. It is the power of salvation. Rather than be embarrassed that the world considers the gospel foolish, I ought to boast in it. It is true wisdom. I can boast about what Christ has done for me. So to conclude, let's talk about this picture Paul paints of who comes to salvation. We know that the so-called right people, the powerful, successful people, they can boost me up the ladder. Being friends with the movers and the shakers can help me get ahead in the world. And the temptation is to only seek out those kind of people because maybe they can help me make something of myself and get a leg up. If I associate with the right people, then I'm one of the right people and I can get ahead. But one implication of Paul's argument is that we ought to stop valuing and measuring each other on those kinds of standards, and we ought to see each other with new eyes. We ought to stop measuring each other on worldly status and accomplishments, and we ought to seek to befriend and treat those the world considers losers with the same graciousness that we treat those the world considers the intellectual elite. It's not our natural inclination. It's much more secure and satisfying to be on the team that everyone else thinks is the great team to be on, and we all fall victim to that temptation. Like the Corinthians, we can look at our local church and wish we had more of the intellectual, beautiful, sophisticated people in it. This leads to what I call the huddle syndrome. Imagine a party where everyone is facing the center of the room. So the people in the center are considered the in group. They're the ones deemed hip and cool and powerful, the elite, the beautiful people, and everyone else stands behind them facing their backs. This kind of huddle situation allows minimal interaction, minimal communication, and minimal conversation. And I think it visually illustrates what happens when people spend all their social energy seeking to be friends with only the inner circle, only those they consider the socially elite or the in crowd. At this party, everyone thinks that they're the farthest outside the center because they are focused on the backs of the people closer in. And nothing happens to break the solitude. Everyone feels isolated and feels like they're on the outskirts. Now, imagine you're standing somewhere in the middle of this strange party. What can you do? Well, you could try to elbow your way to the center, and if you did, you know what you find? Nothing special. Once you're in the center, they're just regular old normal folks there. And additionally, once you're in the center, no matter which way you turn, you will still lack contact with the majority of the people at the party. So what else can you do? Well you can turn around. Right behind you is someone else who wants to be part of the group, someone else who feels isolated and unaccepted. In any social group, including the church, no matter how left out you feel, you can usually find someone who seems to fit in even less than you do. If a significant number of people at our strange party turned around or sideways, then the huddle would break up into lots and lots of clusters, each of which could foster an interesting connection and a friendship. Rather than the action happening only in the center, the action can occur all over the room. But we have to break free of this mindset of valuing only the elite and the powerful in the crowd to metaphorically turn around. We can also apply Paul's picture to ourselves and reflect on what we boast about. Many of us probably have smarts, skills, wealth, beauty, a place in the community. Some of us are wise and wealthy and powerful, and those are gifts of God, and it's okay to have them, but we dare not use them to find our worth or to measure the worth of others. What counts is the promise of God. What counts is Christ crucified, and it is really easy to think too highly of ourselves because of gifts God has given us. Our boast is in Christ crucified, not in worldly accomplishments. We need to see our flaws as flaws and see the depth of our problem with sin as a real problem that is solved by the cross of Christ. But I can rejoice in what God is doing about that. True, I didn't do anything to gain it, but if I believe the gospel, I am among the wealthiest of the wealthy in the world, even though I didn't earn it. It was a gift of God based on the cross of Christ. I have nothing to get puffed up about, but I have everything to rejoice about. So my boast is that I belong to God. Not because I was smart enough to find Him, but because He was merciful enough to find me. You've been listening to the Wednesday and the Word Podcast. My mission is to explain not only what a passage means, but how I reach those conclusions. If this podcast has been helpful to you or you've enjoyed listening, please leave a comment on Apple Podcasts because it really does help others find the podcast. And tell your friends about it. It's really easy to subscribe, just go to Wednesdayandtheword.com and click on subscribe to this podcast, and it will show you how. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates of Heartfeltmusic.org. I invite you to check out his music and CDs. They are fabulous. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krissan Morata, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.